Premium Subscriptions

July 18, 2023

Module 6 — Lesson 32

The first way to monetize your newsletter with beehiiv is to offer premium subscriptions. Often called ‘Paid Newsletters’, premium subscriptions are when readers pay you a monthly or yearly fee in exchange for you to send them exclusive emails/content.

What are a few good examples of paid newsletters?

The great thing about paid newsletters is you can structure them any way you’d like to:

  • Weekly stock report

  • Extra case study on a famous person

  • Monthly pack of content templates

  • An inside look at your business numbers

  • Exclusive invite to a private community

The options are endless. The key is to understand two things:

  1. What your audience deems valuable

  2. What you can consistently sustain

Here’re a few examples from different beehiiv publications:

1) The Milk Road

Weekly exclusive Crypto and investing insights

2) The Offer Sheet

Private access to the top real estate property deals

3) The AI Exchange

Access to private workshops, events, and groups

4) Deals Done For You

Full access to the top Airbnb deals and deal analysis deep dives

5) Just Go Grind

Exclusive events, masterminds, and content

Is your mind racing with ideas yet? I know mine is. And we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet…

The best part?

Unlike other newsletter platforms (that take 10% of all your subscription revenue) — beehiiv doesn’t take a cut of your subscription revenue at all. ALL subscription profit is yours to keep.

So here’s how to set up your Premium Subscription:

1) Connect to Stripe

You should’ve already done this in the last lesson. If not, shame on you. Just kidding.

  1. Visit Settings → Publication → Premium

  2. Connect your Stripe account under the Premium (Paid) Tier

2) Set your prices

Once you've connected your Stripe account, you'll be able to set both a Monthly Subscription Price and an Annual Subscription Price. Note that $1 is the minimum you can charge.

3) Promote the benefits of premium

Under the Premium (Paid) Tier you can add a Premium Summary and a list of up to four Premium-only Features that will be promoted on your "Upgrade" page, displayed after users subscribe for free.

4) Send premium-only content

When you're creating a post, under Audience, you're able to select which tier of subscribers you'd like to send to. When you have premium enabled, you can choose between free, premium, or both. To send a premium campaign, you would select Premium.

Watch this video for the full tutorial:

5) Add a paywall to your newsletter

You can drop a custom content break anywhere in your premium content.

What this means:

  • As a paying reader of your publication, I'm able to read the post in its entirety

  • As a non-paying reader of your publication, I can read up until that content break, and then am prompted to upgrade to read the rest (hence the "teaser")

Just a single click and the content break is added directly into your post.

And this functionality applies to both web and newsletter content, meaning you can send a single newsletter to your entire audience (both free and premium tiered subscribers) and we'll dynamically render the correct version to your readers pending their subscription tier. Ditto for web.

Here's an example found in one of our users' newsletters:

You can also follow this video for an easy step-by-step on setting up a paywall in your content:

What You Should Know Before You Start a Paid Newsletter

Before you start your paid newsletter, you should answer these 7 questions to make sure it's the right monetization vehicle for you:

1) What problem am I solving?

While it’s not the case for all paid newsletters, most of them solve a clear problem that their audience wants to pay for. If your audience doesn’t see you as an expert, insider, coach, guru, or trusted authority, you may want to keep creating free content to establish trust.

2) Do I have an existing audience?

On average, you can expect 5-10% of your free subscribers to convert to your paid newsletter. Do you have enough free subscribers to drive meaningful revenue? If not, you may want to grow your top-of-funnel before you launch your paid newsletter.

3) Is my audience willing to pay for a paid newsletter?

Not all audiences are created equally. An audience filled with VCs and investors are more likely to pay for a paid newsletter that gives them access to exclusive investing deals compared with an audience of broke college kids reading a newsletter about skateboards. Is a paid newsletter right for your audience?

4) Can I generate valuable content consistently?

Your paid newsletter should deliver something new and high-value, not just “more of the same” content. Value comes in different forms — but usually, people will feel more comfortable investing in your paid newsletter if you:

  • Solve a painful problem

  • Make them feel smarter

  • Save them time

  • Give them something they can’t get anywhere else

5) Am I pricing the paid newsletter correctly?

Again, it depends on who your audience is. A quick way to make sure your price is in the ballpark of what people would pay is to look at your competitors’ paid newsletters.

6) How much time do I have?

How often will you send your paid newsletter? How much time does it take to create each newsletter? Is the time you spend on the paid newsletter justified by how much you earn from it?

Can you plan content weeks or months ahead of time?

7) Is it worth it?

A paid newsletter isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it source of passive income. If you think regularly creating free content is difficult, now you have to juggle two newsletters — and your paying audience will have higher expectations.

I’m not trying to scare you off or anything… these are simply questions to think about before you start.

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